4 Ways to Avoid Data Disasters

Whether you are working in an office or working from home – all of the files and data that you create – can be potentially at risk. Simple things such as maybe spilling a cup of coffee on your laptop (or in my case, 32 ounces of H2O) to experiencing a full hacking or hijacking – may potentially cause you to lose out on not only your hard work but also money!

Here are 5 tips to think about going forward:

1. When you are on the road, you data is potentially vulnerable.
   
   Anytime you log on to the free WiFi at Starbucks, think about the fact that you are potentially opening yourself up to security risks. If you are working on a balance sheet for a client, somebody could potentially be intercepting your data. A better solution? Use a WiFi hotspot through your cellular provider. This feature will allow you to create a secure connection to the internet and help minimize the potential of your data being hijacked.
   
2. Your laptop is your car, not your garage.
   
   I know what you are thinking, yet another car analogy but let me explain – where is one of the only true places that your car is safe? Your garage! Your laptop is a lot like your car, you use it get work done! When you are out in public and just happen to turn away, it’s easy enough for someone to walk past and pick up themselves a new piece of technology. Make sure that you are copying or backing up your files regularly. We recommend that you back up in at least two places: 1. an external drive like a flash drive or external hard drive and 2. somewhere off-site. Look at services like Sync, DropBox or iCloud. At a minimum, this well help you ensure that your data can be recovered (more on this in a minute)!
   
3. Despite what the Care Bears told you, sharing is not always caring.
   
   Speaking of online services like Sync or DropBox, you may be tempted to share a file with a co-worker or client directly from one of these services. But what happens if they accidentally delete the file? The best solution? Send them a copy instead of a link!
   
4. Storage and safety are not equal.
   
   Most people have a safety net built in to their daily lives – a nest egg, health or car insurance, etc. But just copying your files to an online service or an external hard drive still has its own risks. When we mentioned earlier that we recommend saving files to a minimum of two locations, we also highly suggest taking this one step further through the utilization of an automated backup service. What services like these do are automatically scan your hard drive for new or changed files and automatically backs them up. No drag and dropping! The best part? Let’s say you need to take a look at a file from three days ago that you know you have saved over multiple times. These services typically offer you something called “versioning” meaning you can actually go back in time and look at the file from before you had saved it!

Now these are just a couple of brief suggestions and by no means and exhaustive list. What these four points start is a conversation. Let us know if you have any questions or how we can help answer these questions for you!